page_title: John Rosenbaum
section_title: Biography
hierarchical_section_title: John Rosenbaum / Biography
caption_attribution_description: English: Creative Playthings xylophone, still in unopened original packaging in the permanent collection of The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis
context_page_description: John Rosenbaum, was an American physicist, educator
  and kinetic sculptor, associated with the San Francisco Renaissance and the counterculture of the 1960s.
context_section_description: John Rosenbaum graduated from Cornell University with a degree in engineering physics in 1957. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1960s. He contributed to the Harvard Project Physics textbooks. He was associated with the free school movement in the 1960s, and was a colleague of the educator Herbert Kohl, who described Rosenbaum's educational work in his books The Open Classroom and Math, Writing & Games in the Open Classroom. He designed the Xylopipes xylophone children's toy for Creative Playthings. Rosenbaum created "Light Boxes", kinetic sculptures using polarized light and layers of cellophane laminated between pairs of rotating glass disks, producing changing patterns and colors similar to, and on a smaller scale than, light shows projected at rock concerts in the 1960s. He was exhibited by the Landau Gallery in Beverly Hills, among others. He was a colleague of silk screen artist Arthur Okamura. He designed the original logo for Herbie Mann's Embryo Records. He died in Alameda, California of complications from Parkinson's disease in 2003.
caption: Xylopipes, designed by Rosenbaum for Creative Playthings, ca 1960s
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